THE NORTH CAROLINA RICE FESTIVAL
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Why Rice?
The Carolinas - North and South - were the hub of rice production in the 1800s, and rice was the largest export to other countries, such as England. The crop was called "Carolina Gold" because of the wealth that it produced for the colonies, which grew the Southern Plantation economy. This "gold" originated in West Africa, as did the slaves who were brought to the Carolina region and beyond because many had the skill and knowledge to plant, grow, harvest and process rice. The Gullah Geechee are descendants of these West Africans, and Brunswick County is the home of many descendants of rice planters as well.
Rice-Growing Regions of the Southeastern U.S.
Rice planting, Orton Plantation (Brunswick County, NC), 1890. NC State Archives
Enslaved Africans harvesting rice
A History of Rice Cultivation in North Carolina
The low-lying marshlands bordered by fresh tidal water rivers of the Carolinas and Georgia proved to be ideal for rice production. The soils were rich, reasonably flat and highly fertile. They also were so soft a man could hardly stand on them, with twice a day tides pushing fresh river waters onto the flood plains, nothing else could be grown there. By 1700, rice was established as a major crop for the colonists. That year 300 tons of American rice, referred to as “Carolina Gold Rice,” was shipped to England. Colonists were producing more rice than there were ships to carry it.
Rice farming’s extremely high hand-labor requirements are credited with having started the plantation era of the Southern States. Even with ox and mule-drawn equipment of those years, rice “farms” or plantations of only a few hundred acres required from 100 to 300 laborers to prepare the soil, plant, harvest and thresh their production-all by hand.
The rice that was brought to and grown along North Carolina’s southeastern coasts was in fact an African variety of the highly profitable crop, oryza glaberimma, one of only two domesticated species in the world. To satisfy the demands of growing national and international markets for that rice, the European (and later American) southern colonists enslaved and brought to the South thousands of Africans, mostly those from the fabled “Rice Coast” of western Africa, whose cultures and societies had been growing and enjoying rice for centuries.
Those Africans and their descendants, who later became known as Gullah Geechee for the distinctive pidgin (and later creole) language they created to communicate with each other, were forced to toil in North Carolina’s vast lowlands from the early 1700s until their emancipation in the late 1800s. For hundreds of years, their unpaid labor transformed that region’s marshy swamps into highly productive, high-yielding rice fields. Their knowledge and skills as agricultural engineers transformed southeastern North Carolina into a rice-producing powerhouse renowned for its impact on the fates, fortune and foodways of the American South, the nation, and the world.
Golden Grains of White: Rice Planting on the Lower Cape Fear
by James M. Clifton
With the permanent settlement of the Lower Cape Fear in the 1720s by a group of wealthy South Carolina planters, a new agricultural staple was introduced into North Carolina—rice. Rice by this time had proved to be the “golden grain” of South Carolina as tobacco had earlier become Virginia’s “golden leaf.” These planters, from the St. James Goose Creek Parish about twenty miles up the Cooper River from Charleston, brought numerous slaves with them to the Cape Fear and acquired extensive holdings along the main river (about thirty miles in length) and for some distance up both the Northeast and Northwest branches of the Cape Fear.
While much of this land was retained by the planters for their own development, a sizable portion of it was cut up into smaller sections and sold, and a number of plantations were developed shortly along both sides of the river. Thus was the Cape Fear settlement a land of large plantations from the beginning—the very opposite of most colonial settlements—an extension of the South Carolina plantation system and in a larger sense that of the West Indies, especially Barbados.
Travelers in the area reported seeing rice growing as early as 1731; in the same year the Assembly established it as one of the official “commodities” of the colony, indicating its having reached some status as a crop. Marshlands suitable for rice culture—those of “a wet, deep, miry Soil; such as is generally to be found in Cypress Swamps; or a black greasy Mould with a Clay Foundation”—abounded along the Cape Fear river and its branches for a considerable distance inland.
No plantation records—planters’ journals, business papers, or correspondence with overseer or factor—have survived to shed any light on individual experiences or profits among the rice planters on the Lower Cape Fear. Only a few scattered bits of information give any idea as to the facilities on any of the plantations. It is known that Orton Plantation, southernmost of the plantations and historic home of “King” Roger Moore before his death in 1750 and later home of Governor Benjamin Smith in the early l800s, located in Brunswick County about midway between Wilmington and the mouth of the river, had a water-powered “rice machine” and mill as early as 1825. Clarendon Plantation, five miles below Wilmington in Brunswick, was advertised in 1834 as having a “brick barn with a framed mill house attached and two [water-powered] threshing mills.” Belvedere Plantation, immediately west of Wilmington in Brunswick and home of two governors, Benjamin Smith in the late eighteenth century before his purchase of Orton in 1796 and Daniel L. Russell in the late nineteenth century, had by 1831 “a threshing machine and other machinery” in “a barn, 110 feet long, 40 feet wide,… of brick, put up in the most substantial manner.”
The Civil War caused no disruption of rice planting on the Lower Cape Fear. Except for deteriorating facilities and badly worn or broken tools and implements, the rice crops continued to be produced as usual. The end of the war, however, brought almost total chaos to the rice industry there for the immediate moment. The rice planters found themselves suddenly dispossessed of several thousand slaves, and some even of their land. Orton, Kendall, Lilliput, and Pleasant Oaks, the four southernmost plantations and collectively making up a stretch of more than five miles along the river, were wrested from their owners by the Union military command in Wilmington and “set apart for the use of freedmen, and the destitute and refugee colored people,” a situation which continued from April until September, 1865, when a decree from President Andrew Johnson returned the plantations to their original owners. Undoubtedly the invading army had taken from the rice plantations what it needed in the way of livestock and supplies; however, it seems to have inflicted no sizable destruction on them as had occurred on some of those in South Carolina and Georgia.
Courtesy of the NC Office of Archives and History, The Colonial Records Project
Map Courtesy of the Plantations Cape Fear Map ©2003. All rights reserved.
Presented by the North Carolina Office of Archives & History, in association with the University of North Carolina Press
Video Documentaries
The NCRFI, in partnership with the Brunswick Arts Council, produced these educational and historical videos. The videos highlight the significant role that rice production played in the development of southeastern North Carolina.
Click on the links below to view the videos:
"Gullah Geechee History and Rice Growing in Brunswick County"
Journey deep into the North Carolina low country, where rice was gold, landscapes were reconfigured, and waterways were harnessed to bring this prized and profitable crop to market, due largely to the horticultural knowledge and agricultural skills of the enslaved Africans who were brought to this region by force to sow, tend, and harvest a bounty, though indigenous to their homelands, that they would themselves would never reap.
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"Gullah Geechee Foodways in Southeastern North Carolina"
Join award-winning Wilmington chef and Festival Culinarian Keith Rhodes for field and kitchen demonstrations of mouth-watering Gullah Geechee cuisine as it was prepared by the enslaved peoples who brought rice cultivation to this area and as modern chefs prepare and present it, fusion-style, for contemporary palates.
READING RESOURCES
A History of the American Rice Industry, 1685-1985, by Henry C. Dethloff, Texas A&M University Press, 2000.
A Woman Rice Planter, by Elizabeth Allston Pringle, The University of South Carolina Press, 2021.
African Impact on Colonial Agriculture. ouramericanrevolution.org https://www.ouramericanrevolution.org/index.cfm/page/view/m0135#:~:text=It%20has%20been%20most%20thoroughly,Carolina%2C%20along%20with%20South%20America.
Africanisms in the Gullah Dialect (Southern Classics), by Lorenzo Dow Turner, The University of South Carolina Press, 2002.
Agency and Diaspora in Atlantic History: Reassessing the African Contribution to Rice Cultivation in the Americas, American Journal of Ophthalmology, December 2007
Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas, by Judith A. Carney, Harvard University Press, 2001.
Carolina Gold Rice: The Ebb and Flow History of a Lowcountry Cash Crop, by Richard Schulze, Arcadia Publishing (The History Press), 2012.
“Carolina’s Gold Coast: The Culture of Rice and Slavery.” Coastal Heritage Magazine: scseagrant.org. https://www.scseagrant.org/carolinas-gold-coast-the-culture-of-rice-and-slavery/#:~:text=As%20lowcountry%20rice%20planters%20profited,trade%2C%20meanwhile%2C%20rapidly%20expanded.
Deep Roots: Rice Farmers in West Africa and the African Diaspora, by Edda L. Fields-Black, : Indiana University Press, 2014.
Lorenzo Dow Turner: Father of Gullah Studies, by Margaret Wade-Lewis, The University of South Carolina Press, 2007.
Rice and Slaves: Ethnicity and the Slave Trade in Colonial South Carolina—How White South Carolinians Acknowledged the Diverse
African Peoples Among Enslaved Workers, by Daniel C. Littlefield, Indiana University Press, 1991.
Rice: A Savor the South Cookbook, by Michael W. Twitty, University of North Carolina Press, 2023
RICE: Chemistry and Technology, Third Edition, edited by Elaine T. Champagne. U.S. Department of Agriculture, Agricultural Research Service, Southern Regional Research Center, New Orleans, 2004.
Rice: History, by Thomas L. Rost 1997. https://labs.plb.ucdavis.edu/rost/rice/introduction/intro.html.
“Rice production in the United States.” Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rice_production_in_the_United_States#:~:text=African%20rice%20(a%20separate%20species,adopted%20by%20masses%20in%20America.
The Simple Art of Rice: Recipes from Around the World for the Heart of Your Table, by Jj Johnson and Danica Novgorodoff. Flatiron Books, 2023
Them Dark Days: Slavery in the American Rice Swamps, by William Dusinberre, University of Georgia Press, 2000.